Donna Air does a Bridget Jones with new blog

Donna Air is teaming up with the dating website eHarmony to launch a
confessional internet diary.

Donna Air does a Bridget JonesPhoto: PA

Tim Walker

6:28AM GMT 13 Jan 2011

Since her engagement to Damian Aspinall was broken off in 2007, Donna Air has been coy about matters of the heart. “I try to keep my private life quite discreet these days,” she told Mandrake last year.

Now, however, the 31-year-old television presenter has agreed to bare all in a confessional internet diary.

“Donna is going to be writing a blog about her experiences to tie in with Dr Gian Gonzaga’s new book, Dating the Second Time Around — Finding Love That Lasts,” says a spokesman for his publisher, the dating website eHarmony. “Her blog will launch around Valentine’s Day.”

Air, who has a seven-year-old daughter, Freya, by the casino-owning son of the late zoo keeper John Aspinall, has been linked romantically to John Dorrance, the Campbell’s Soup heir.

Mandrake wonders if Miriam O’Reilly, the ousted 53-year-old Countryfile presenter, who won a landmark ruling against the BBC in which the corporation was found to be guilty of ageism, has done her female colleagues such a big favour.

Emily Maitlis, the Newsnight presenter, put a brave face on things yesterday. “I wonder how many BBC executives have been pinged emails by their female presenters and reporters with the immortal words 'Ha! Can’t sack me now!’ Of course, they still can. But from today it may become harder to do so for reasons of age or looks.”

Maitlis, 40, will, I fancy, now have a lot longer to wait for her senior colleague Kirsty Wark, 55, to surrender her perch on the programme.

Anthony Steel's surprise

The Oldie is becoming a salacious magazine in its own old age. Its readers will recall Anthony Steel playing stiff-upper-lipped characters in Fifties films such as The Wooden Horse and The Sea Shall Not Have Them.

John Miles, one of the magazine’s writers, recalls meeting Steel, who died in 2001 at the age of 80, while he was courting the Swedish actress Anita Ekberg, whom he later married.

Miles was with his regiment in Mobassa and was struck by how aloof Steel was to Ekberg when he saw them at a bar.

“The reason for his aloofness soon became obvious when he started chatting up some of the better-looking lads among us and they promptly beat him up,” Miles adds.